A Staten Island judge blocked Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s second-home tax rollout, finding the city needlessly harmed homeowners and ordering City Hall to start over.
A Staten Island judge blocked Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s second-home tax rollout, finding the city needlessly harmed homeowners and ordering City Hall to start over.
Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court on Staten Island sided with homeowners who sued New York City over how it tried to collect a new surcharge on high-end second homes. The ruling did not kill the tax itself. It stopped the city’s method of deciding who owed it and forced a do-over.
The Washington Examiner reported that Ozzi found the rollout left owners “substantially harmed and penalized needlessly” by the city’s “method of implementing the tax law.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani appealed soon after the decision landed.
The pied-à-terre tax is an annual surcharge on homes valued above $5 million when no primary New York City resident lives there. City Hall moved to enforce it by publishing an online list of nearly 1 million “properties that may be subject to the charge,” complete with owners’ names.
Officials also sent notices to around 17,000 New Yorkers warning that their properties could face the tax. Homeowners sued. Their case did not claim the tax was illegal. It challenged the way the city decided who would pay.
Ozzi ordered the city to take the broad list down and replace it with a limited one that shows only properties actually subject to the tax. He also ordered the notices canceled and replaced with detailed ones that explain how the city determined who owed the charge. The pool of people tagged as subjects must be narrowed.
Randy Mastro, a lawyer and former city official who represented the homeowners, celebrated the win and put the blame on the rollout.
"City Hall botched this rollout and should have just admitted the errors and fixed its own mistake, instead of wasting time and taxpayer dollars by fighting it in court,"
Mastro said.
That is the core failure the court addressed. A city that wants a new tax still has to identify the right people before it posts names and mails warnings. Ozzi said the method used here needlessly punished owners. Mamdani’s response was to appeal rather than fold and fix the process first.
In an April post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump tore into the mayor’s tax approach and warned that the city was on the wrong track.
"Sadly, Mayor Mamdani is DESTROYING New York! It has no chance! The United States of America should not contribute to its failure. It will only get WORSE. The TAX, TAX, TAX Policies are SO WRONG. People are fleeing. They must change their ways, AND FAST. History has proven, THIS ‘STUFF’ JUST DOESN’T WORK."
Trump wrote.
The court fight does not settle every policy argument about second-home surcharges. It does show what happens when City Hall builds a sprawling list, floods owners with notices, and then spends public money defending a process a judge later calls needless harm.
Mamdani wanted the revenue tool. He got a judicial order to scrap the list, cancel the notices, narrow the targets, and explain the determinations in plain detail. The appeal keeps the dispute alive. It does not erase the record of a rollout that treated nearly a million properties as maybe-taxable and left thousands of owners holding vague warnings.
Taxpayers should not have to bankroll both a sloppy levy and the lawsuit that follows when officials refuse to fix their own mistakes.
